At the Blog
On Monday, Amy Kapczynski kicked off a new year at the Blog by explaining what’s wrong with institutional neutrality rules, what the push for neutrality means for higher ed, and what we can expect of powerful institutions in the second Trump era.
On Wednesday, Greg Baltz analyzed three recent tenant union campaigns – in Kansas City, Chicago, and New York City – to illustrate how tenant unions organize in the shadow of the law to build power.
ICYMI: With the Supreme Court taking up Braidwood Management v. Becerra, worth (re)reading Lindsay Wiley and Liz Sepper’s post about how religious liberty challenges to the Affordable Care Act represent a major new vector in the campaign against social insurance in the United States.
A Changing of the Guard: after three years noble service, Amna Akbar is rotating off our Editorial Board. Beyond writing for the Blog, helping scout new LPE authors, and sharing her sage guidance, Amna was a catalyst behind our series on non-reformist reforms, our series on law clinics and racial capitalism, and our book symposium on Dorothy Roberts’s Torn Apart and Wendy Bach’s Prosecuting Poverty, Criminalizing Care. We couldn’t be more grateful for her service!
Fortunately, to help this ship of Theseus stay afloat, two rising stars of the legal academy have agreed to join the Board: Zohra Ahmed, an associate professor at BU who writes and teaches about the US carceral state and US militarism, and Lisa Washington, an assistant professor at UW-Madison whose research focuses on the intersections of family regulation law, the criminal legal system, and the immigration system.
In LPE Land
Cool CFP alert: On March 21-22, the LPE Project will be co-hosting a conference at The New School on Carceral Political Economy in the Era of Late Mass Incarceration. Abstracts due January 31, 2025.
On Thursday, Jan 30, the LPE Project will be holding a lunch talk with Dean Spade on “Sticking Together in Tough Times.” Join us in-person or online.
In two weeks (Jan 31 – Feb 2), the Systemic Justice Project’s 2025 conference will taking place at HLS on Facing the Future: Organizing and Lawyering for Justice.
Cool Post-doc alert: The Program on Ethics, Politics, and Economy at Yale is hiring two post-docs, with a focus on political economy.
The Law and Political Economy in Europe Project invites applications for its third Summer Academy, taking place at Erasmus University Rotterdam on 2-4 June 2025. Deadline: 23 February.
In the UCLA Law Review, Jasmine Harris has a new paper on “The Political Economy of Conservatorship.”
At the HLR Blog, Jonathan Harris has a new post defending the FTC’s recent rule against non-competes and functional non-competes.
On the hit podcast Digging a Hole, Karen Tani discusses her 2024 Harvard Law Review Supreme Court foreword, “Curation, Narration, Erasure: Power and Possibility at the U.S. Supreme Court.”
In Dissent, Ned Resnikoff, Brian Callaci and Sandeep Vaheesan debate the YIMBY agenda to solve the housing crisis.
In N+1, Amna Akbar writes about Andreas Malm, Luigi Mangione, and our current moment.
At ProMarket, Beth Popp Berman discusses the historical relationship between antitrust and industrial policy.
Cool CFP alert #2: the Michigan Journal of Law and Society (MJLS) is accepting submissions for its fourth volume. MJLS aims to publish interdisciplinary scholarship that will deepen our understanding of the law and the social forces that shape it, including work that engages with race, class, law, history, society, power, politics, geography, gender, economics, philosophy, etc. They are currently accepting (1) Articles; (2) Book Reviews; and (3) submissions to the MJLS Lab section, which is dedicated to shorter, developmental pieces of 3,000-8,000 words from students and early-career researchers.
